GOGOL IN ROME (Salt Publishing, shortlisted for England's Jerwood Adelbugh Prize)
Katia Kapovich possesses one of the freshest, most arresting poetic voices I have heard in a long time. She can sway effortlessly from the most common detail into zones of sheer imaginative wonder. That she offers a rare view of a poet's daily life in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia only adds to the broader significance of her writing. Gogol in Rome is a powerful gathering of her best work in English.
-- Billy Collins
Katia Kapovich's indelible vignettes introduce us to the eerily desolate landscapes of post-Glasnost Eastern Europe, often through the filter of that dream-like, transitional consciousness peculiar to the recent émigré to America. Her poetry is singularly vivid, poignant, and manages to capture in miniature what Babel and Chekhov achieve in their finest tales.
-- August Kleinzahler
COSSACKS AND BANDITS
(forthcoming from Salt in 2007)
"Katia Kapovich's new book of poems retains all her familiar virtues – her marvelous sense of story, her fearless but elegant use of form, her wit and delight in the world – but shows evidence of a new confidence in her adopted language. She moves with new lyric ease between Cambridge and Russia, between sensuous apprehensions of American life and memories of friends and family left behind. Some of the poems, especially those written in a tone of wry lament, and from a position of difficult exile, are absolutely heartbreaking."
-- James Wood
"Poems that chatter and sing at the same time. Melodic stories. Lyrical gossip. Writing which makes itself heard."
I am a bilingual poet writing in English and Russian. I used to be a dissident in my youth, emigrated from the USSR in 1990, and currently live in Cambridge, Mass., with my husband, the poet Philip Nikolayev, and our daughter Sophia.
My work is well known and widely published in the two languages that I write in. The Russian spelling of my name is ???? ???????. There are seven books of my Russian verse. My first collection of original English-language poems, Gogol in Rome, was published by Salt in 2004. Salt is also the publisher my new collection, Cossacks and Bandits, forthcoming later this year.
Thanks for adding me. I was in the park of the Villa Borghese a fortnight ago, having just visited the Etruscan Museum, and as I went past the statue of Gogol, a fellow tourist took its picture and remarked to her companion, 'Look, it's Google!' I looked again -- and indeed it was.
Katyusha, much love and bestest wishes for a very happy forthcoming birthday, with infinite returns! And thanks from the heart for editing FULCRUM!
Your book Gogol in Rome rocks, rules and kicks butt (nobody else can pull off your kind of tone, not to mention such fresh and memorable subject-matter), and we can't wait for your new volume to some out from Salt.
Thank you for accepting us as your friend. One of us (Hippolyte) is a big fan of Brodsky, so it’s great to come across another poet who writes in both English and Russian.
